In case you’re looking to upgrade your PC to Windows 10 for free, you may be in luck, because some reports suggest that Microsoft’s ‘free upgrade’ offer, which officially ended in 2015, might still work on some machines with legitimate Windows licenses. According to Redditor u/newtekie1, Microsoft is still allowing free upgrades from Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 to Windows 10, although, it’s not immediately clear as to whether it’s intentional or just an oversight.
According to WindowsLatest, users can get their free update by downloading the Windows Media Creation Tool on the system running a genuine copy of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1. Users will then need to run the tool to download a copy of Windows 10 and start the installation. Do note that you’ll have to enter your existing Windows license key to be able to install Windows 10 without paying for the upgrade.
While we haven’t had the opportunity to try out the method ourselves, another Redditor, a self-proclaimed Microsoft engineer with the username u/CokeRobot, says they can confirm the process works and, is an intentional ploy from Microsoft to enable folks to migrate from older operating systems. According to them, “You still can do this no problem, however … do an upgrade keeping everything (because) if you choose to (wipe) everything and start fresh, you lose your free upgrade”.
Since the thread got picked up by the media, many others have also started to claim that the process works for them as well, but as mentioned already, we’re yet to try this on any of our machines, but if you do have an older Windows machine that you want to upgrade to Windows 10, you can give this a try and let us know if it worked for you.
